Andrea O'Brien

Poems that spring from the particular are paradoxically often the ones that open the window to the universal experience. My particular experience, as a woman who lost her mother at any early age, determines how I see the world and, thus, how I write about it. In addition, the bodily experience, which seems especially gender-specific for me, consistently informs the images and metaphors of my poems. Beyond this, I think the influence of gender on my work is so innate that I find it difficult to define.

Thank you for driving your wife to her appointment, for circling the ramp of the parking garage, spiraling upward in a manner so organized that you could believe it to be a Fibonacci sequence. Thank you for leading your spouse down one flight of steps to the lowest level of this building, for touching her back or arm at the bottom of the stairwell. Thank you for sitting in a straight-back chair surrounded by the unspoken presence of cancer, for leaning into your partner’s bone-stiff space when she is beside you, and for waiting alone when she leaves the room through the heavy door that needs oiling. You are patient—sipping a hot drink from a throw-away cup and reading well-thumbed magazines or the latest courtroom thriller. The potted houseplant on the table beside you could almost be growing from its plastic tips— it is so alive. You do not know it, but the morning trill of birds has diminished with the traffic. In your silent presence, you are as generous as the sister or girlfriend who has had her own breasts exposed and flattened, who has held her own breath until the technician told her to exhale. You wait while your lover waits in a back room, dressed in a cotton gown that opens in the front. Peonies bloom across her body, across the breasts you have brushed with your fingers and laid your head upon so many nights, the breasts that have nourished young, the breasts with their slope so unlike any part of your own body. You are someone to go to, to share the car ride home after the films have been analyzed, after the results have been transcribed in her records—as permanent as this day—so you wait in a chair where other husbands have waited, where other women have waited, hands shaking from filling out forms and remembering the women who lived, survived, then died from a lump. It only matters that you wait for her, wait for the only woman in the world to walk to you and whisper, It’s clear.

My Mother’s Bras

Some—exotic in lace and satin—dangle from hangers like symmetrical clouds taut over their horizon. Some swing from one thin strap, cup over cup like orbiting satellites, while those on the floor wait to be collected like shells washed up on a beach.

These are not my mother’s bras. Hers, specially made, reserved one cavity for a prosthesis. Some she bought at the store on the opposite side of the city where women shopped after sacrificing one or both breasts.

Some she stitched herself, starting with one worn before the mastectomy, then sewing one of my father’s handkerchiefs— cleaned and ironed— across the back of the cup like a hollow, hidden pocket.

That cloth—securing her new breast, partitioning silicone from scar tissue that inched across her skin like a worm fattened by rain— that thin fabric, once tucked in my father’s suit coat, was the sail that thrust him against her whole body.

St. Joseph’s

My father walked me to my mother’s room, my small fist balled in his hand like a tissue. I was something to hold onto. The room wide as water, she was docked across from us like a ship. Her body had become the pale moon of my mother, the thin tubes of IVs anchoring the pierced skin.

Everything was colorless. Even the patients passing the open door in their dressing gowns were overexposed photographs bursting into light. Everything was clean: the machines clicking and whirring, the floor that beamed back distorted images, the bedsheets binding my mother like a sacred ibis.

Everything was untouchable, from the crescent leaves of stems in glass vessels to the collapsed veins of her scarred, new body. This was the first memory of being alone. Every day after she grew as distant as the haunted depths where fish have no pigment.

Soon I told my father I was ready to visit Jenni and Frank, playmates two floors up who were eating ice cream with wooden spoons and no tonsils. My mother and I locked eyes, nothing to keep us from drifting apart. I waved and turned away from the rise and fall of her breastbone.

Unmoored, destined to tread our repeating stories, I would learn to navigate my own way, following the blotted memory of her like the beacon from a lighthouse, the whitewash of the north star, the wrinkle of birdcall that interrupts morning, like a constant, reflective signpost—more symbol than word.

Andrea O’Brien’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications, including The Hopkins Review, Connecticut Review, North American Review, and The New York Quarterly. In 2007, the Kentucky Foundation for Women awarded Andrea an Artist Enrichment grant to begin writing her second collection of poems. She lives in central Kentucky with her husband and works as a writer and editor.